This electric vehicle will supposedly be available in the US by Fall 2008. Driving range without an ethanol extender 114 miles, top speed 62 mph. The Norwegian investors purchased the company when Ford Motors wanted out.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

Over the years you’ve no doubt heard about the holy grail of energy technologies: “free energy.” Well, it looks like one company may have done it: Steorn, in Dublin.

Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy – that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

So this isn’t a small thing.

I say, keep your eyes peeled. I like thinking about what this could mean for the world, even as a hypothetical situation.

Leaving aside hosted applications for the moment, let’s consider one of the aspects of what superior software must look like.

The better companies no longer worry about locking people in to their software. They give you a much clearer exit path and instead bank on their ability to provide you with superior service, confident that you’ll choose them as a partner to help you manage software that is completely transparent.

“First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer’s sense of isolation and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of self-loss – that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God.”